Which way to go for a laptop?

[axemanxt40]

Hey there guys, I am looking to purchase an ALL purpose laptop. I need it to be really good with gaming (able to run DX 9 stuff well) so I am thinking 9600 Mobility Pro + w/ at least 128 MB of video memory. I plan on getting a gig of RAM, however if I order from Dell I am going to take the standard amount, order the memory from crucial and install it myself.

However, where I am stuck is which chipset to go with?

P4, Pentium M, or AMD64?

I need this machine to also have some decent battery life as it might be dragged along to lectures in college, and I would like to be able to use it when/if I travel without it dieing on me in like an hour.

Vendors I had in mind:

• Hypersonic (either the 17" P4 machine, 15.4" P4, or 15.4" AMD64)

• Dell (either the 9100 or the 8600)

 

[John]

I need this machine to also have some decent battery life as it might be dragged along to lectures in college

I'd recommend a notebook w/ the Pentium M cpu. The only drawback is most of those notebooks are not going to have a "gaming" graphics card in them.

Here's an Inspiron comparison chart

 

[axemanxt40]

Well the 8600 you can upgrade so that it has a 9600 128 MB Pro Turbo card which isn't bad at all. It is also the lightest out of all the laptops, and its significantly cheaper than Hypersonic's AMD 64 machine.

 

[AIWGuru]

My current University recommends Centrino platforms because of the easy on campus wireless access and guanteed compatibility.

 

[axemanxt40]

Anyone have some benchmarks on the Intel M processors vs Intel P4 (the ones they put in the 9100, which I think are DTR processors)?